The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  14

  THE WAITRESS, THE REFUGEE AND THE KILLING BOX

  by Sarah Ferguson

  One of the best moments for a reporter on any story is immediately after it is commissioned. It’s the moment where anything is possible, before setbacks and the pitiless approach of the deadline can trim the story’s ambition. For 50 years, Four Corners reporters have set out on stories with the same visceral determination. Styles of filmmaking change, edits are faster, the grabs are shorter but the essentials of a classic Four Corners investigation are unchanged. A meticulously researched, well-told Four Corners has the same potency to shock and provoke now as it did in John Penlington’s time or at any time since.

  One of the biggest media stories of 2011, ‘A Bloody Business’, an investigation of the live cattle trade to Indonesia, sat right on the margin of acceptability for shocking and provoking the audience. Animal welfare campaigners Animals Australia first took their footage of brutality in Indonesian abattoirs to Channel 9. 60 Minutes looked at the material and rejected the story because they judged that the pictures would be bad for ratings. When producer Michael Doyle and I sat in our conference room a few days later, looking at the same footage, we were unable to hide our discomfort at the gruesome pictures. Four Corners Executive Producer, Sue Spencer, commissioned the story that afternoon, urging us to be uncompromising in our choice of images.

  The significance of ‘A Bloody Business’ is not just that Four Corners would run such confronting images in prime time but as an example of how the program deals with source material. Lyn White from Animals Australia and Bidda Jones from the RSPCA came to us with more than ten hours of powerful visual material and detailed scientific analysis to support it. The footage was shot from two cameras and in key scenes the timecode was unbroken (meaning the camera was not switched off at any point) giving us an unusually high level of confidence in the integrity of the material. For most media outlets it would be enough to go straight to publication. Instead, we explained that we would conduct our own independent investigation, and that was likely to take six weeks. Jones and White were taken aback and uncomfortable with the proposed delay, but that is the way Four Corners works, accepting neither documents nor vision at face value, no matter how compelling a case they appear to make.

  Weeks later, cameraman Erik Havnen, Michael Doyle and I arrived late at night in Jakarta, dropped our bags at the hotel and headed straight to an abattoir on the outskirts of the city. As we got closer to the building, an open doorway framed the bloody scene inside. I was suddenly unsure of myself; I hadn’t admitted to the others how squeamish I was. I recalled the figure of Lyn White in the footage we’d watched in Sydney, video camera in hand, almost spectral in the dingy light, standing as close to the dying animals as she could. Once we passed through the doorway of the abattoir, my discomfort evaporated, replaced by certainty that the story we had come for was there.

  In the hot fetid air, the floor awash with blood and animal parts, a large Australian steer, roped around the ankles was thrashing its head on a concrete slope in the corner, each crash of its skull echoing around the room. A metre or two in front of the flailing beast, the slaughtermen cut the head off another animal before dragging the carcass across the floor and, with a thick clanking chain, hoisting it into the air. The quick rasp of knives being sharpened mixed with the gurgling sounds from the dying animal’s throat.

  The Indonesian owner of the abattoir, Hendri, pointed excitedly at the metal restraining box where the animals were roped before being pulled over for the kill, ‘Australi! Australi!’ he said. The words ‘Meat and Livestock Australia’ were stamped on the sides of the box. We knew this abattoir, Gondrong, was one the Australian cattle industry had invested in heavily and within minutes of our arrival almost every cruelty we had anticipated was on display.

  No one besides Hendri seemed interested in why we were there. Buyers with wads of cash and receipt books sat impassively at the back of the room, watching the slaughter. Another large beast crashed out of the box and struggled to get to its feet, almost swimming on the slick surface of the slope as a slaughterman tossed buckets of water over its head. Outside more Australian cattle waited in the half-lit pens. The coloured plastic tags in their ears spoke of the vast distances they had travelled: Wave Hill in the Northern Territory, AACO Queensland. Only when an Australian steer with a broken leg was dragged away in front of us did the owner order Erik to stop filming.

  The previous week we had driven through the neat paddocks of Newcastle Waters in the Northern Territory, the showcase property of the former Packer cattle company, Consolidated Pastoral. CEO and industry-founder Ken Warriner spoke candidly about the failings in Indonesia. The contrast between his almost pampered animals and the pitiful creatures we saw in Indonesia struck us more than anything else while making the program. Expensively reared animals would be sent hundreds of kilometres across the ocean to spend months in sometimes luxurious feedlots to end up in a broken rusty raceway waiting for a blunt knife in an untrained hand. As a number of inquisitive white Brahmin nuzzled at the window of Warriner’s truck, I asked him if cruelty would be tolerated on his property,

  WARRINER: Here? No. Oh, no. They’re made very clear in their induction that any cruelty will not be tolerated and —

  FERGUSON: So why would you tolerate it when they’re in Indonesia?

  WARRINER: Because I think it’s going to take time to ‘get there’.

  Warriner was hospitable despite the threat our upcoming program posed to the industry he had forged. Over tea taken in the shade of the back of his truck, served with freshly baked cake, he argued that the live cattle trade was so vital to the north of Australia, the industry should be allowed all the time it needed to make improvements in Indonesia.

  The industry’s dilemma was best expressed in a moment of silence that only broadcast media could capture when we put the question to another cattle farmer, Rohan Sullivan.

  FERGUSON: You say we’ve got to have patience, but why should animals suffer while we help Indonesia get its act together …?

  SULLIVAN: Because I think that um … [very long pause]

  FERGUSON: It’s a hard question, isn’t it?

  SULLIVAN: Yes.

  In Jakarta, we returned to the abattoir for a second night to see if what we had witnessed on the first evening was an anomaly. The slaughtermen had put on uniforms for our second visit, the hangers-on had been shooed away, but everything else was the same. Within earshot of our translator, the abattoir owner told his slaughtermen to lie about their training and technique. After two days we had almost enough material to be able to go home. Instead we travelled for ten days through West Java and Sumatra, the two areas of Indonesia where live Australian animals are shipped to, testing the assumption that the conditions we had seen ourselves and in Lyn White’s footage were widespread.

  The further we travelled the more tension we seemed to encounter. When we reached Medan in the north of Sumatra, the location of the most brutal scene of torture in Lyn White’s footage — where an animal with a broken leg was beaten, kicked and gouged in the eyes and nostrils — we were forbidden entry to the main abattoir. The security guards threatened us to stop filming in the street outside.

  In Australia, all that remained was an interview with the Minister, Joe Ludwig, who was responsible for the live cattle trade and directed taxpayers’ money to the abattoirs we had visited. We offered Ludwig the same deal that the live cattle industry group had accepted: to see a representative section of the footage in advance of an interview. Ludwig refused to be interviewed. His staff went further, demanding that Four Corners hand over all the footage shot by us and by Animals Australia before the broadcast. We refused.

  On the Friday before broadcast, we sat in a crowded edit suite for the viewing of editor Alec Cullen’s final cut. As well as the program staff, the ABC had sent two senior managers to view the material. As the story progressed, Michael Doyle and I scribbled on our scripts the cuts we bot
h thought would be demanded. When the final scene faded to black on the monitor, Spencer turned to the room and said, ‘Change nothing.’

  Animal welfare campaigners Lyn White and Bidda Jones didn’t like the program at first. They hadn’t expected the program to include the recent efforts made by Ken Warriner and business partner Greg Pankhurst to import stunning devices to small abattoirs in Sumatra. That is the critical difference between advocacy and journalism. Their initial reservations were forgotten once they witnessed the extraordinary response to the program.

  As ‘A Bloody Business’ was being broadcast, a wave of revulsion swept through the viewing public. The volume of responses on Twitter and Facebook was unprecedented for the ABC, the Four Corners website crashed, MPs reported a deluge of calls demanding action while the program was still running. Animals Australia and the RSPCA teamed up with social activists Get Up! to harness the momentum of that impassioned response, calling for a total ban on live export. By the end of the week, the government had suspended the cattle trade to Indonesia. The ABC’s Managing Director, Mark Scott, observed that truckloads of media coverage were being delivered to him every day for weeks afterwards.

  In the immediate aftermath, much of the cattle producers’ distress was turned on its own representatives. Cattlemen phoned in to rural radio programs weeping. The government’s decision was supported by some industry heavyweights, like Peter Holmes à Court, who called for tighter regulation in Indonesia. But the response to high-impact programs comes in waves, and sooner or later someone turns on the ABC to take a shot at the messenger. During periods of intense scrutiny like these, as a reporter you are intensely grateful for the rigour the program demands. We had hours of our own footage as well as the footage from Animals Australia, the RSPCA’s analysis and documents from the industry and their own veterinarians backing up our assertions. In probably the lowest moment, West Australian Senator Chris Back accused Animals Australia of paying an abattoir worker to torture the cattle. His allegation was specific; one look at the uncut footage would have shown the events he described could not have taken place. The Senator never asked to see the footage but nor did the journalists who reported his allegation under the headline, ‘Animal Footage Faked’. Uncritical news reporters under pressure to produce a fresh headline, especially in online news, reported the allegation without checking whether it could be true or seeking any comment from us. Disappointingly, that included reporters at the ABC.

  While slaughter practices in Indonesia have changed significantly as a result of the program, the greatest impact was on the profile of animal welfare in Australia. Bidda Jones from the RSPCA said this about ‘A Bloody Business’:

  Never before had the treatment of animals received such sustained and widespread attention in the media or government. The program not only led to a fundamental shift in government and industry policy on live exports, but the Four Corners program shifted animal welfare in Australia from a fringe issue to the mainstream.

  The ratings for the first broadcast of ‘A Bloody Business’ were the lowest of 2011 for Four Corners. After the broadcast, ten times as many people as usual came to the Four Corners website and they kept coming as the story developed. Almost 50,000 more people watched the program on the ABC iview. By every calculation, Sue Spencer’s decision to run the program in the uncompromising way we did, paid off.

  A few stories we do are obvious, demanding to be done; many more are based on an instinct that a bigger story lies beneath an apparently minor event or series of events. It takes painstaking research to get those stories to air. The opening of the 2009 NRL football season provided an example of this phenomenon. Several sordid incidents involving rugby league players and the mistreatment of women dominated the first weeks of the competition. One Monday morning, the headlines of yet another weekend’s drunken scandal splashed across the sports pages, and Sue Spencer slapped the Sydney Daily Telegraph on the conference table demanding to know what was going on. The resulting program was ‘Code of Silence’, produced with Ivan O’Mahoney.

  In the weeks leading up to its screening, it seemed as though the program would never make it to air. Researchers Kate Wild and Anne Connolly searched for women who’d been involved in incidents with footballers, scouring social media for contacts, leaving messages with friends and relatives. Not only did the women not want to appear on camera but initially they didn’t want to speak to the researchers at all. Their fear of the public backlash was too overwhelming. Women who’d tried to bring assault charges were so scarred by their experiences with the media they were unwilling to go public again. The researchers persevered. Kate Wild found the stories depressingly similar: ‘It was always about sexual predation. In the situations we were hearing about, women were treated by players as little more than the spoils of victory.’

  Ivan and I sat with a softly spoken policeman from a state Sex Crimes Squad who’d supported a woman bringing charges against a player, only to see her pull out just before trial. She also turned down our interview request. The ex-wife of a well-known player poured out a tearful recollection of a drunk, abusive ex-husband, but she was too afraid of him and of the vitriol of the club’s devoted fans to go public. One woman, whom we called ‘Caroline’, who did take part in the program said this about her decision not to press charges for assault: ‘There’s no way. It’s not like if he was just another guy. I would be going up against him, the football team, the NRL, their fans. I’m not going to take that on.’

  Meeting this young woman was the first breakthrough. She had been the victim of a drunken rampage by Newcastle Knights players who had broken curfew after a game and wandered into her university dorm; it was her first week at university.

  Seated under a pool of light in a darkened ABC studio, Caroline described how she had been woken from sleep in her dorm-room bed by a man climbing on top of her, his hands reaching round to her breasts. She struggled to find the right words to describe what happened next: ‘H-he put his hands down to — I don’t know — what do you say? Touched my private parts …’ He told Caroline to roll over as she struggled to push him off.

  The 48 hours after the assault were almost as bad as the event itself. The policewoman who examined Caroline later that night for physical evidence was unsympathetic. The following day Caroline took refuge in a university office, hiding behind its shuttered blinds from the media pack camped outside. Two days later she dropped the charges.

  After the program went to air, the father of the Newcastle footballer texted angry messages to Four Corners, saying we had no right to include the story, that his son had suffered because of it. He did not ask about Caroline or the affront and shame that she had lived with since.

  The most dramatic story within ‘Code of Silence’, the group sex incident involving the Cronulla Sharks and a young New Zealand waitress, was the easiest to track down. Sports journalists had known about the story in 2002 but chose not to report it — as they admitted — out of loyalty to the players.

  Anne Connolly located the young woman at the centre of the story, whom we called ‘Clare’. Clare had been offered money immediately after the incident to tell her story to Australian networks and magazines; she had refused. Once Anne explained the breadth and purpose of the program, Clare readily agreed to take part on the condition her identity was disguised. Seven years after the incident, she had only just reached a point in her life where she was able to talk about it. The intervening years had seen her personality disintegrate in shame and self-loathing; binge drinking and depression took over her life to the extent where she was barely able to leave her house, having abandoned work and study.

  The bare bones of Clare’s story had made news headlines at the time. Members of the Cronulla Sharks tour of New Zealand in 2002 were accused of sexually assaulting a young woman during an incident at the Racecourse Motel in Christchurch. The CEO of the Cronulla Sharks told the media that, as far as he was concerned, nothing had happened. After the team’s return to Australia, New Z
ealand police flew to Sydney to interview 40 players and staff. According to police, they admitted that 12 men had been in the room during the course of the evening; six had sex with Clare while others had watched, but Clare had consented to all of it. The police decided there were no assault charges to answer; the case was closed. One of the investigators remarked afterwards, ‘The young woman was manipulated to the point where she couldn’t give meaningful consent.’

  For Four Corners though, this story wasn’t about consent but, like the other examples, the demeaning abuse of a young woman by high-profile sportsmen, including the practice of ‘gangbangs’ or ‘buns’, to use the players’ jargon. In the program, veteran sports journalist Roy Masters described how the practice had been viewed by some in the game as a form of bonding:

  It has been a vehicle of team bonding … there could be little doubt that a girl that might’ve accommodated three or four players was all part of players becoming a closer knit unit, for want of a better word. I do think it in the past may well have been a focus of team players relating to each other.

  Gangbangs were not a new topic for Four Corners. (See Chapter 1: ‘This program will go to air over my dead body’ for John Penlington’s recollections of his 1968 story about outer suburban Sydney youths discussing the practice.)

  During their 2002 investigation, police noted Clare’s naivety and her confused attempts to mitigate the shame and embarrassment about what had occurred, admitting her distress only to her closest friends. Investigating officer Neville Jenkins said: ‘She was a nice girl. She was young, naive, not worldly, just a growing up teenager. But even for 19 she was quite young I felt.’